Manny Rayner's book reviews

Hell is other people. It's a terrific piece of theatre. Though every time I read this play - I have unfortunately never seen it performed - it occurs to me that, logically, heaven should be other people too, and that Sartre is perhaps taking an unjustifiably gloomy view.

There is an incident in Huis Clos where one of the characters offers another one her eyes to use as a mirror. (There are no mirrors in Hell). I have wondered several times whether the Velvet Underground's track "I'll be your mirror" is a reference to this scene. Was Nico trying to cheer up Sartre? It seems possible that they could have met.

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I was thinking about this play earlier, for some reason, and recalled a conversation I'd had with Beth Ann and Jordan some time in late 2007. We'd just watched the Bergman film Persona, and I was in the middle of a Smolin book, which as usual had a lot to say about General Relativity.

It occurred to me that there was a sort of connection. Both in Huis Clos and in Persona, you have a situation where a small group of people - three in the play, two in the film - are alone together for an extended period, cut off from the outside world. They discover that they have to redefine their personalities with respect to the perceptions of their fellow-prisoners, and they become reflections of those people. They don't really exist in the way they thought they did. It's a bit like the situation in Relativity. There is no absolute space or time; the frame of reference is created by the massive bodies in the Universe. If you're near to a black hole, it redefines spacetime so that nothing else is very important. I thought the analogy was particularly clear in Persona. Bibi Andersson is a much weaker character than Liv Ullmann, and she finds that she is being absorbed by the other woman. As in Huis Clos, this is a terrifying experience.